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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24750448">A Certain Shade of Red</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/NatalieTheCat/pseuds/Natalie%20the%20Cat'>Natalie the Cat (NatalieTheCat)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rebuild of Evangelion | Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Comedy, Horror, Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:13:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,579</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24750448</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/NatalieTheCat/pseuds/Natalie%20the%20Cat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a point where this needed to stop, and they have clearly passed it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Certain Shade of Red</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>With apologies to Lavanya Six</em>
</p><p>
  <strong>"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?" Job, 41 1:5</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>"Hell is other people." -Sartre</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>"Hell is repetition."- Stephen King</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>"Hell is just a word. This is the reality." -William Weir</strong>
</p><hr/><p>"Shinji," Gendo said, calm, cool. "I know about the time travel."</p><p>Before he took a drink of his coffee, Shinji said, "are you going to do this every time?"</p><p>"I have a feeling we've had this conversation before," said Gendo.</p><p>"We probably have," Shinji agreed.</p><p>"Anything besides the coffee?" said Gendo. "I don't know about you, but I'm starving."</p><p>Gendo didn't wait for him to answer. He stood up from the table booth, which was the only one serviceable in the ruins, and walked behind the counter. Though the roof had been torn off and partially collapsed, the kitchen was miraculously intact. Gendo had found this-</p><p>How long ago was it? He stopped to think, furrowing his brow.</p><p>"The usual," Shinji said, turning the cup of coffee in his hands.</p><p>Gendo checked that the grill surface was hot (it was always hot, why did he still check?) and took a mixing bowl and began whisking some eggs. Yui and he had acquired a taste for the french style omelette while they were on assignment in Paris, when she was a brilliant scientist and he was her thug husband that everyone pretended not to notice, like she had an embarrassing growth.</p><p>He cooked in amicable silence. Shinji toyed with the headphones on his music player, a memento from Yui, made eternal by their shared condition.</p><p>"Just once," he said aloud, "I'd like to start a little early so I can pack something to read. You take too long to cook."</p><p>Despite his complaints, Gendo was shortly finished and served their breakfasts: omelettes, with unbuttered toast. Shinji ate neither reluctantly nor hungrily.</p><p>"Ever wonder what would happen if one of us starved ourselves?" he said.</p><p>Gendo sat down opposite and poured himself another cup of black coffee.</p><p>"I'm not eager to try that one. Especially since it won't work. I don't think it matters how we die."</p><p>Shinji's expression twisted down at the word. When he looked at Gendo, he had the haunted eyes of an old man long past his prime.</p><p>"I can't do it anymore," he said. "Do you have your sidearm?"</p><p>"No," said Gendo, lying.</p><p>He carried it at all times.</p><p>"Do you remember that first cycle? I mean, the first one we shared."</p><p>Gendo nodded.</p><p>Shinji had lost count of the repetitions he endured before the same phenomenon ensnared Gendo. Everything had been perfect- he corrected all the mistakes he'd made previously despite the boy's experience. Unlike Shinji, who foundered for several years before he learned to leverage this nightmare, Gendo had adapted immediately.</p><p>It should have worked, but the pain was the same the second time. Blunt teeth crushing his hand from his arm at the elbow, the unique, almost piquant sensation of his bones being twisted apart by inhuman strength, then they explosive shivering nothingness of the anti-AT field and the peculiar vision of Yui's jaws closing around his midsection, pulping him from consciousness to...</p><p>...sitting at his desk with Fuyutsuki standing next to him, muttering about pencil pushers and budgets.</p><p>It had all been perfect.</p><p>Several times.</p><p>These little conversations had been Shinji's idea. They declared the ruins of the restaurant neutral territory, formed a kind of accord between them. They'd occasionally meet here all during the cycle, to hammer out petty little agreements and truces. After murdering him five or six times, Gendo had developed a peculiar sympathy with his son. He started letting the boy at least get laid before it all went to hell.</p><p>At first, he was all fire and energy.</p><p>"Don't hurt RItsuko," he'd said to Gendo once, "If you do I swear I'll kill you."</p><p>He had. Gendo underestimated him; immortality had given the coward his courage, and though Shinji was executed moments later and the cycle once again reset, he'd taken his sworn vengeance.</p><p>Gendo Ikari lost count of the cycles before it happened, but the moment in his memory was so vivid that he could get lost in it. Shinji had walked into the diner halfway through, sat down, and waited patiently for their order. As Gendo recalled, he had a simple ramen dish. Gendo, with his more worldly palate, had a steak served in the western fashion, blue rare. He was slicing it when Shinji said it.</p><p>"I killed Asuka."</p><p>Gendo dropped his utensils and stared at him, openly.</p><p>"What did you say?"</p><p>"I ground up some of Rei's pills and put them in Asuka's glass of water before she went to bed. She passed out in her sleep. I sat next to her and made sure there was no pain. Misato was out last night, so no one has found the body yet."</p><p>The deadness in his voice was chilling. He began to eat his noodles.</p><p>"I couldn't do it to her again." he said, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. "I couldn't watch her fall apart." He barked out a small, twisted laugh. "I couldn't watch her be eaten again. I <em>couldn't</em>."</p><p>Gendo was silent. The waitress came to the table, he waved her off angrily.</p><p>"I'm not going to stop," said Shinji. "I won't watch Misato lose the love of her life for the thousandth time. When she walks into the apartment, I'm going to take her backup pistol that she doesn't know that I know she has and shoot her point blank in the back of her head. If Ritsuko drives her home, I'm going to cut her brake lines. The next time I have to get in the Eva, I'm going to rip loose of my moorings and kill everyone in Central Dogma, and keep killing until my batteries die. Until there's just us. Then we'll wait and see if it worked or not."</p><p>Gendo nodded, calmly, and without missing a beat, pulled his weapon from the holster tucked under his left arm and blew his son's brains out. It hadn't been the first time. A few cycles ago, they'd tried shooting each other at the same time. Of course Shinji had botched it and Gendo...</p><p>...put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger.</p><p>The next cycle began with an angry confrontation.</p><p>"Don't do that again," he'd snarled.</p><p>"Why not?" said Shinji. "What do you care? You've never given a damn about anyone but my mother. Asuka is a tool. She's a human shield to keep me alive until you need me for Instrumentality. You told me that yourself."</p><p>"Shinji, you forget yourself," said Gendo.</p><p>"What is it I forget, Father?"</p><p>"You forget that we merged in Instrumentality. I know your thoughts. I know the real reason you killed her."</p><p>"Why?"</p><p>He sat down with Shinji and they ate.</p><p>"There comes a time, when you have lost someone so dear to you that they made life a living thing, that you begin to hate them for every existing at all and inflicting this pain on you."</p><p>"Nonsense," said Shinji.</p><p>"You didn't kill her to protect you. You killed her because... how long to the cycles last? What is it, September 15th to New Year's Day?"</p><p>"You know that already," Shinji grumbled.</p><p>"So that's what, four months? And we've done this how many times?"</p><p>"I forget," Shinji said, bitterly and transparently.</p><p>"So, multiply... You're an old man. Thanks to all those repetitions before I came to awareness of the cycle, <em>you</em> are now older than <em>me. </em>You must be in your forties, chronologically."</p><p>"So what?"</p><p>"...and she's still a little girl. She'll never grow up. Ever. Not while we're like this."</p><p>"Get to the point," Shinji said, almost snapping a chopstick.</p><p>"The point," said Gendo, "is that you've grown beyond her and you know it."</p><p>"What are you suggesting? That I fuck Misato this time? That could be arranged."</p><p>"We both know that isn't possible."</p><p>Shinji snorted. "Anything is possible."</p><p>"I know your mind. I've <em>been</em> you, hundreds of times. I know your deepest thoughts. Every time you swear you're going to ignore her this time, just let her go, and then on the aircraft carrier she puts her hair up to put on her-"</p><p>"ENOUGH!" Shinji bellowed, and sent the plate flying, The Usual and all.</p><p>It had been many cycles since he had seen Shinji weep real tears. He simply shattered, sobbing uncontrollably into his hands. Gendo left the words unspoken, instead ruminating on old memories of his dead wife, dead now how long... forty years? Fifty?</p><p>Longer?</p><p>Their minds had been merged so many times that Gendo couldn't tell the memory of one Sea of Souls from another, but for the first time in his unnatural life, he understood exactly how his son felt.</p><p>Eventually, the crying stopped.</p><p>"I lied. I didn't sit beside her."</p><p>"I know."</p><p>"I held her head in my lap-"</p><p>"Shinji, I know. You don't have to tell me."</p><p>"I don't have to tell <em>you. </em>I could have saved her. I could have called for help. Instead I watched her eyes flutter open as she turned blue. She saw me. <em>She knew.</em>"</p><p>"I know," Gendo said, very quietly. "She was in the Sea with us."</p><p>Shinji pulled at his hair, shaking.</p><p>His strength shocked Gendo. This time, Shinji shot himself.</p><p>The next several cycles were decided unpleasant. Shinji refused to fight, the end came months early, and Gendo felt like a track on a skipping phonograph record, thrust into universal communion and torn out again, sometimes within less than an hour. By the time Shinji handily dispatched Satchiel again after a hundred "losses," Gendo vomited at his desk when the cycle started and left the details to his adjutant. That dizzying hell lasted for months.</p><p>There had been no diner that time. Only Shinji sitting on piece of rubble in the plugsuit, watching them take Rei away. Gendo found him there, and the old man in his eyes.</p><p>"What did I do to deserve this?"</p><p>It was then that Gendo had a realization.</p><p>"What if it's not about us?" he said.</p><p>That was a dozen cycles ago.</p><p>Now, they were eating in silence.</p><p>"Are we just going to do it all again," said Gendo.</p><p>"I don't see why we should bother not to," said Shinji. "We tried changing it, remember. If I make anything different, it goes wrong. Someone always dies in Unit 3. If I tamper with things too much, Rei is killed by Ramiel, or Asuka falls into theoretical space trying to rescue me and disappears."</p><p>The pain in his voice at that one was distinct. Gendo, as always, knew his son's fear: That if Asuka fell into the void, she would somehow be gone from the cycle, that he would come back to a world where Asuka Langley Soryu never existed. He had seen it with the clarity of the mind's eye in the sea of souls. A terrifying nightmare in which Shinji ran screaming through a world that was right but wrong, missing the one key element that needed to be there before others.</p><p>They had, indeed, tried everything. Gendo had enlisted Ritsuko as often as he'd killed her. They'd told Misato, they'd told Kaji. Gendo had Kaji killed before he took possession of the embryonic Adam; Gendo Kaji hit with an N2 strike from an orbital platform.</p><p>He'd rather enjoyed that one.</p><p>None of it worked. The outcome was always the same.</p><p>Shinji, each time, was more wooden, more acerbic. He was burning out.</p><p>Gendo, on the other hand, was coming to a brutal realization.</p><p>He was beginning not to care. His mistakes had no consequences. He could try any path from any decision offered to him. He could explore, endlessly, the skeins of his fate. Yes, he'd been condemned to a hell without exit or end, but it was a hell with potential.</p><p>Better to reign than serve and all that.</p><p>After they finished their breakfast, they began the usual terse parley. Gendo no longer much cared about completing the Red Earth Ceremony; it would happen even independently of him and trying to control its course was just another way to torture himself. They made agreements. Rules of safe conduct. Laws of a non-aggression pact. Shinji always opened with a demand that Asuka be left alone; Gendo always argued with him, not because he intended the girl any harm, but because Shinji wouldn't buy it unless there was some pointless dickering.</p><p>Yui must have been part fishwife.</p><p>"It's agreed," said Shinji.</p><p>They nodded curtly to each other and parted ways. Shinji walked down the street, to meet Katsuragi where she'd parked to wait for him. She would drive him home, and he would gloomily agree to live with her, which only prompted her to enjoy more extreme antics to get the proverbial rise out of him. It was harmless; like all of them, everything was a way to inflict pain on herself.</p><p>They all, Gendo, realized as he walked back to his staff car, made themselves jackets like iron maidens, lives lined with hooks to shred their skin so they could never truly rest. How marvelous it would be to take them off.</p><p>How marvelous.</p><p>Gendo arrived in his office an hour later. He sat behind his desk. The enormous weight of every motion held him in slowed time, like he was moving through gelatin. He knew the contents, by heart, of every message sent to him through the secure system. He knew the heads of SEELE were waiting for him and the central committee was about to lambast him about budgets.</p><p>Budgets. They were going to commit ritual genocide and they were worried about a budget overrun. What were they afraid of, that the bondholders would come after them after they'd all be turned into foul smelling red liquid?</p><p>He caught himself laughing. Quite maniacally.</p><p>"What are you laughing at?"</p><p>Akagi had come looking for him. She a lab coat buttoned over her lcl-slick wetsuit. Her bottle blonde hair was smashed against her skull, slicked back with rust-colored liquid that would begin to stink mightily and clot if she didn't get it out in the next few hours. And damn her, she had that bloody pullring down past her breasts.</p><p>Gendo stood up and walked over to her. He seized the ring and yanked it to her throat, sharply. It startled her, even though she'd anticipated.</p><p>It was no wonder she'd gravitated to him. They fed hungers in each other. Ritsuko <em>wanted</em> it to hurt.</p><p>He put his hands on her shoulders.</p><p>"Why don't you get cleaned up, hon. I have something important that I need to tell you. Over dinner, I think. I made us a last minute reservation in the French district."</p><p>She blinked.</p><p>"The French district? Did you just call me hon?"</p><p>"Yes, the expatriate neighborhood. It's fitting," Gendo sighed. "Some things, you can only say in French."</p>
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